Professional Documents
Culture Documents
An important part of interviewing is following up on things people tell you. Your initial
question opens the door to an issue, and your interviewee's response is a first draft of an
answer to your question. One that draft is on the table, you need to ask more questions
to get the full story. Here are the main categories of follow-up questions you will need.
People tend to speak in abbreviated ways, assuming you know what they mean. Don't fall
for that. Assume you don't know what they mean and ask questions to force them to say
more. If a teacher says, "We went over this in class," ask what "went over" means to her.
If a student says, "It was nice," ask what "nice" means to him. Plan on asking questions
like these:
When you say, [term or phrase], what are you actually doing?
So you are saying . . . .? [any time you paraphrase what you think your interviewee said, you
need to be sure and ask them if your paraphrase accurately captures what they meant]
Again, people will give you abbreviated summaries of things and you will find that you
need to ask for more details. Here are the kind of questions you need to be prepared to
ask:
1
If I were watching you do this, what would I see?
You will want to learn if their response would be different in different circumstances.
You might consider questions such as these.
Last week I observed a teacher who did B. What do you think of that approach?
Last week I interviewed a student who said he thought B was more fun because . . . . What do
you think about that idea?
I recently read about a school that had a policy that required B. How would you feel about a
policy like that?
2
Suppose a new teacher came to your school and she advocated doing B. How would you
respond to that idea?
You will probably want to know about a specific list of factors that you think are relevant
to your topic. If you are asking about tests, for instance, you might want to know their
response to, say, open-ended vs fixed option responses, or about the amount of time the
test takes, or about how the results are used or something else. Though your initial
questions should allow them to construct the issues, at some point you will want to ask
about the variables or factors that are of special interest to you. So you can ask about
them in particular, with questions like these:
What about the length of time the test takes? Does that matter?
It is not uncommon for interviews to wander off course, and for you to spend a lot of time
talking about things that will ultimately not be useful to you in your study. Don't let this
turn into a chat. You want to be friendly and courteous, but you also have a task to do.
To steer your interviewee back after a digression, try pushing on how the digression
happened in the first place. Try questions like these:
Can you recall the associations that led you from our original topic to this one?
I'd like to understand more about how this relates to the earlier topic we were talking about.
8. ACCOMMODATE EMOTIONS
Can you say something about why this issue generated so much emotion?
What aspects of this issue do you think prompted such strong emotions?